


The Millennium Deal - Epilogue: Waterlines

by Cara_Loup



Series: The Millennium Deal [8]
Category: Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-16
Updated: 2015-12-16
Packaged: 2018-05-07 03:23:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5441630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cara_Loup/pseuds/Cara_Loup
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Over Ylab’s jungle, steams hang like a pall in the midday heat, like a memory of fire. Luke steps closer. His arm slips around Han’s waist, and his face rubs against Han’s shoulder blade, warm with the sun. “Come on... what is it?”	<br/>The question slides against his skin, mingling with the crawl of furious protest.	<br/>“Just that I should’ve expected this, I guess,” Han mutters. “It’s why Chewie ‘n Castor bailed out. We all knew what was coming.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Millennium Deal - Epilogue: Waterlines

** Epilogue: Waterlines  **

Fragments of mortar and charred wood crunch fretfully under his boots. He shifts the carcass of a blackened beam, and there’s a shapeless, churning mass still smoldering below. The stench of plastic slag winds up to his nostrils and careens into a random nerve that recalls the sear of second-degree burns. Time runs in frantic circles through the gap of that moment. Warping itself between dislocated realities.

“What’s wrong?”

The sound of Luke’s voice snaps him from it, and he hoists the scorched wood aside, tossing it to the floor.

“Nothin’.” He gestures at the deformed plastic, glazed with molten crystalplex. “That must’ve been the percolator.”

One more item on a list of implements that can easily be replaced; it’s really not worth stewing over. But the house —

Once more, he cranes his neck at the skeletal remains of the roof, a heated spill of anger roiling in his stomach. Irrational and overblown as it is, he can’t seem to keep it down.

From behind him comes a soft noise as Luke steps closer. His arm slips around Han’s waist, and his face rubs against Han’s shoulder blade, warm with the sun. “Come on... what is it?”

The question slides against his skin, mingling with the crawl of furious protest.

“Just that I should’ve expected this, I guess,” Han mutters. “It’s why Chewie ‘n Castor bailed out. We all knew what was coming.”

“But still,” Luke offers.

“Yeah.” Han turns to wrap an arm around Luke’s bare shoulders.

Over Ylab’s jungle, steams hang like a pall in the midday heat, like a memory of fire.

A ribbon of sunlight falls against the side of Luke’s neck, and the smear of soot just beneath his hairline stirs Han with another jag of recognition. He trails his thumb across it and then his fingers tangle in Luke’s hair. The silky glide frictions against the stark outline of memory, against the moment when he stood knee-deep in rubble and couldn’t make himself reach out. He pulls Luke to him and leans over, inhaling the scents of ash and sweat and tropical fireblossom on his skin, tasting something more essential when their lips meet.

Some defiance blends into the kiss, but it dissolves under the gentle determination of Luke’s mouth and the merging of breaths that seals this moment. A smile forms against his lips, imprinting itself together with taste and texture.

They walk back through the sooty defile that used to be the corridor. Gol’s hired helpers have been sloppy at their job. Maybe they didn’t see the point of executing vengeance on a deserted house, and a crudely refitted ruin at that.

Easy enough to envision the scene. The door kicked down, hanging splintered on its hinges while several charges plop open in the corridor. A group of three or four watching with lazy satisfaction as the fittings, then the tie-beams beneath the crumbling plaster of the ceiling catch fire. A nattering heat spreads in the hollows beneath the cross-ribs. As soon as the flames breach the roof, they turn and head off to more challenging assignments.

Han runs his thumb across the charcoal ridge of a doorframe. All things considered, they’ve been lucky. Most of the walls are still standing, and the floorboards have survived under a thick cover of plaster and debris. The lounge is a mess, wide open on the far side where the glass doors have burst in the heat. The veranda must have gone up in a blaze over the water, before that afternoon’s rainfall set in. Fast enough to save the more durable parts of the house, if not the decrepit wooden structure.

Only the waterlogged posts and the bare framework remain. They’ve spent the past hour fixing new planks across it, and the result looks like a raft constructed for emergencies. The fresh wood pale and exposed in the midday heat.

Luke grabs a hammer and surveys the stack of hardwood boards. “We don’t have to do this,” he says casually. “If you don’t feel like rebuilding, we can always come back to it later. Whenever.”

Han shakes his head, at the snap of an instant, possessive reaction. He’s refused to own anything for so long, and now he has to accept that he’s not ready to give up on this battered roost. But the impulse fires clear of doubt. “It’s more like... I wanna do everything at once.”

He can see a variety of remodeled rooms, doors thrown open in his mind into half-finished designs that span everything from practicable to plain ridiculous. Crazy fantasies made and unmade at the toss of a coin. But in the middle of that jumble, some kind of plan is coming together.

He looks at the black chips of wood that still float on the lagoon. Most of the debris has sunk to the bottom, fish swarming over it like nothing’s changed.

“Tell me.” Luke hunkers down between the juts of unaligned planks and centers a nail with total concentration.

“Skylights in the bedroom,” Han says and feels awkward for the details drifting in the wake of that image. A blue diffusion of dusk that hangs in the room like clear water. Charting stars on Luke’s skin. “Big ones.”

Luke doesn’t look up from his workpiece, but his smile is visible in profile and just as beautiful.

“Chewie’s gonna want the right kinda room for his hammock.” Han picks up the vibro-saw and sets it against a flank of buttonwood.

All day long, Chewie’s been hauling building materials from the settlement, enjoying himself as all get-out. Every chance they’ve given him, he’s lectured them about different types of wood and how to follow the lay of the grain. They’ll start fixing the roof tomorrow.

For a while there’s no sound except the purring rasp of the saw, the lagoon’s dreamy lap and slosh. Memories flirt with the sunspots on the surface. Just above the waterline, a ragged blue ornament of surviving lichen stretches up across the wall.

Han sits back, caught up in a different view. Noonlight pools across Luke’s shoulders and scoots down his bare back. Two days out here, and the sun has bleached high glints into his hair, and his skin tone is a lighter shade of bronze, recalling life on Tatooine. Now that he’s hammered the new board in place, he runs his fingers across the ripples and whorls in the grain.

“Do you think he’s dead?” he asks abruptly.

“Who — Gol?” Han casts a glance at the sky, a troublesome reflex he can’t quench fast enough. “I don’t see how he could’ve survived with nothing but a space suit in a floating wreck.”

They trade looks that acknowledge wayward possibilities. Gol has survived before, when staggering odds should’ve crushed him from existence.

Han shrugs one shoulder and wipes his hand on his pants, dismissing the notion. There’s always trouble ahead, so what. Easier to take when it’s coming for him though, not Luke; he’s still learning to adjust to that new angle of incidence. Adding facets to his perspective, ever since the day he stormed off Yavin Four, swearing blind that he’d never turn back.

Life just swings through these long cycles instead of moving along a straight trajectory, like outflung orbits around an invisible center. Still makes him dizzy sometimes, when he looks straight at the pivot, not the apogee. The way Gol must’ve felt when he stared down the heart of Corel Prime. There’s a knowledge of likely collisions embedded in every securely plotted course, but that’s hardly news.

_Not now_ , Han thinks — not now, when the sun’s kicking out across the treetops, and they’re building a shelter on the edge of something, and it’s a place to start. Start over.

He looks at the house that may never get done up completely. “So, we’re back at the beginning.”

Luke squats down beside him, brushing mussed hair out of his face. “Not quite.”

Midday’s dancing over the lagoon, and when Han reaches across, the space between them fills out with that knowledge of Luke in his mind, in his senses, the longing that leaves Han dazzled and hungry for his breath.

Luke’s smile captures him with a want that’s reaching past every limit, always.

Not safe. Nowhere except in this conjunction of chance and choice, where the light flits in brazen starts across the water, a sharp pulse in the heat, edging the moment they’ve unlocked into sharing.

And that’s enough.

* ~ * ~ *

**Author's Note:**

> First published as a standalone novel in 2001.


End file.
